What if I had chosen a different course?
I just found my first faculty card (photo below), issued when I first became a university professor. I had my doubts, as I felt more like an engineer or innovator than an academic, but I decided to give it a try, following the encouragement of my PhD supervisor, Victor Basili.
Twenty-six years later, I still have my doubts, but it is too late. ;-)
I made many decisions that, with hindsight, had significant consequences on what was to come. I am not sure I fully realized it at the time.
- I chose to emigrate to Canada over the US (where I also interviewed).
- I chose to focus on Ontario over Quebec.
- I chose to live in Ottawa over Toronto and Waterloo, where I also had offers after my interviews.
- I chose Carleton University over the University of Ottawa after I received offers from both. (Well, I did the opposite 20 years later.) Mostly because Carleton was much quicker at sending their offer, which I thought was a sign of efficiency.
I now understand that these decisions, like subsequent ones, were based on partial information, misconceptions, and a few reasonable arguments. ;-)
However, they later had a significant impact when I decided to move back to Canada. Naturally, I was tempted to return to the city where we had friends, had raised our son, and felt a sense of belonging that I yearned for.
Lessons learned:
-One has very little control over one’s future, though one has to be prepared to seize opportunities.
-Early decisions have a huge but unsuspected impact in the long term.
-These decisions are often based on highly uncertain reasoning and mostly gut feelings.
But I did my best with what I knew at the time I made decisions. And it was all worth it!
Lionel C. Briand is professor of software engineering and has shared appointments between (1) The University of Ottawa, Canada, where he holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) and (2) Ireland's Lero Centre for Software Research, where he holds the position of Director. In collaboration with colleagues, over 30 years, he has run many collaborative research projects with companies in the automotive, satellite, aerospace, energy, financial, and legal domains. Lionel has held various engineering, academic, and leading positions in seven countries. He was one of the founders of the ICST conference (IEEE Int. Conf. on Software Testing, Verification, and Validation, a CORE A event) and its first general chair. He was also EiC of Empirical Software Engineering (Springer) for 13 years and led, in collaboration with first Victor Basili and then Tom Zimmermann, the journal to the top tier of the very best publication venues in software engineering.
Lionel was elevated to the grades of IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow for his work on software testing and verification. He was granted the IEEE Computer Society Harlan Mills award, the ACM SIGSOFT outstanding research award, and the IEEE Reliability Society engineer-of-the-year award, respectively in 2012, 2022, and 2013. He received an ERC Advanced grant in 2016 — on the topic of modelling and testing cyber-physical systems — which is the most prestigious individual research award in the European Union. In 2023, he was elevated to the rank of fellow of the Academy of Science, Royal Society of Canada. He currently holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) on "Intelligent Software Dependability and Compliance". His research interests include: Trustworthy AI, software testing and verification, applications of AI in software engineering, model-driven software development, requirements engineering, and empirical software engineering.